Almanac of the Dead Critical Evaluation - Essay

Critical Evaluation

For many critics, the greatest difficulty with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead is its sheer size, including its large number of characters. Silko has constructed an intricate network of connections between the different groups of characters to demonstrate the complexity of the issues that the indigenous populations of the Americas face, and to show that the different groups have much in common, regardless of how various their superficial problems.

Although the novel is set in the turbulent years of the 1980’s, when the United States had sought to destabilize left-wing governments and had given covert support to right-wing groups—and had supported mining and logging interests that wanted to seize land in the care of indigenous peoples—Silko is keen to make the point that these are simply recent manifestations of a situation that began hundreds of years ago, with the arrival of Europeans. The arrival of the Europeans was prophesied, but she notes that the disappearance of “all things European” also was prophesied. Many of the characters in Almanac of the Dead believe that this time has arrived.

The almanac carried by Lecha and Zeta, and received by them from Zoeme, is a fictional version of the Popol Vuh (c. sixteenth century), a collection of mythological narratives and genealogies from Guatemala that, among other things, includes tales of the Hero Twins, embodied in the present day in brothers Tacho and...